The root cause of inequality is success. If some people, some companies, or some nations did not soar much higher than the rest, the world would enjoy much more equality.

This reality does not mean that inequality is all good, but nor is it all bad. It depends.

A key question might be how did rich people get their money? It’s one thing if it was by helping to cure cancer, or by building a business that provides good products at good prices and pays good wages. It’s another if they merely excelled at sports or acting or some other activity that doesn’t do much to change the world. And it is very difference again if their forte was cutting corners, corruption or crime.

As Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, writes in The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, it also depends on what the most successful people do once they reach the top of the heap.

If winners in the world’s economic sweepstakes serve as useful role models for others, and if they extend a hand down to help others up, then their success is surely not a bad thing. Indeed, they make the world a better place.

The global track record on what actually happens when some folks get richer than the rest is mixed.

Inequality may be shockingly high in many parts of the world, yet, “Life is better now than at almost any time in history,” Deaton writes. “More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty. Lives are longer and parents no longer routinely watch a quarter of their children die.”

Of course, “millions still experience the horrors of destitution and of premature death.”

And he also acknowledges that inequality “can be bad if the winners try to stop others from following them, pulling up the ladders behind them.

“The newly rich may use their wealth to influence politicians to restrict public education or health care that they themselves do not need.”

When the divide that separates the rich from the rest is either growing or shrinking, the impact of this also depends on circumstances. If inequality grows because the rich are getting richer and the poor are not, then it’s socially destabilizing. Or if the gap shrinks because the rich are slipping backwards while the less favoured tread water or fall back at a slower pace, it’s also unequivocally a bad news story.

But what if everyone’s doing better, only the rich at a faster rate than the poor? This might not be how some would prefer the world to be, but it’s progress nonetheless. And what matters most in these circumstances is how low are those at the bottom of the heap allowed to fall.

Deaton is unusual for an economist in that he considers more than money when he looks at inequality. He also includes health.

In much of the world, citizens’ access to both preventive measures and treatment of illness is anything but equal.

Thus, he writes, “Just as important, or even more so, are better health and the improved likelihood of living long enough to have the chance to prosper. Parents living with the constant fear and frequent reality that their children will die, or mothers giving birth to 10 children so that five may survive to adulthood, reflect grisly deprivations that compound the worries about money that haunt many of the same people.”

Canada’s lingering health care inequities — consider the shocking state of affairs on some First Nations reserves that the new federal budget outlines and tries to address — pale by comparison. So does the level of penury for Canada’s poor, who can still get almost enough to eat and almost a decent place to sleep, despite stingy public supports that, for many in B.C., haven’t increased in nine years.

Yet inequality in Canada remains a serious issue for not just politicians and policy-makers, but also the public at large. Saturday’s column will look at this in more depth.